ABSTRACT
John Shaw's working life was devoted to selling things that would make people's lives better and more convenient, if not actually more beautiful or elevated. As Joanne Bailey emphasizes recently, home and the physical comforts it housed embodied the emotions dimensions of family life and expressed the success of John's enterprising provision. At the same time, people must never lose sight of how frequently the letters recurred, and most endearingly, to a noticing of life's simplest, most direct pleasures, especially those that cost little or nothing to enjoy: the weather, the garden, the little things that the children did or said. John and Elizabeth's start in conjoined domestic life was far more modest than Oxley House. Domesticity was central to John and Elizabeth's lives together. Unlike Yorkshire woollen manufacturer Isaac Holden, who seemed entirely at ease away from home, John valued domestic pleasures and securities fully as much as his wife, perhaps even more.
